About 30% of Australian high school age kids are in work training or just straight on work, rather than full time students, and are exiting with not much more than middle school level language and maths skills in a US context. So that PM Abbott isn't keen on coding classes isn't a huge surprise.

This isn't new. In the 20's and 30's, Jewish Americans were the up and coming academic top achievers, and based on merit would have become the largest ethnic fraction of the school. So, the administration found ways to get the kind of WASP-heavy demographic they wanted. Harvard (and the other Ivys) aren't just universities, they are positional goods and attendance is a form of signaling: our next class of business/political elites. To have a demographic that doesn't look like the parents of the current 1% (never mind 0.1%) would signal to them that the school was no longer providing the economic good they send their kids there for.

I appreciate Fiorina standing up a campaign as her personal contribution to the trickle down economy, but I don't think it will remain active long enough to employ more than a handful of people for a few months.

As part of a '70's memorandum of understanding between the US and ROK, giving the ROK access to some US missile technologies, they agreed to limit the range of their missiles, about 180km. Recently, the MoU has been modified, allowing the ROK to design and deploy a ballistic missile that can hit any part of the DPRK.

And, to reply to dj245's comment as to exactly who's to blame for tensions on the DMZ, tension is the very thing that gives the DPRK government legitimacy. They deploy tension whenever they feel the political and/or economic need. It is possible that if the US unilaterally withdrew its forces, the result would be nothing. But, that's a guess. What's known is that with US forces in harm's way, the DPRK's military commission has to take the possibility of massive US intervention into account.

Abstracted, what Davidow, Malone, et al are describing is an economy where the endeavors of the greater mass of people is almost completely divorced from that of the owners of capital. We can already see examples of this in a number of countries where the formal, taxed, audited economy is dominated by extraction industries, where the elite skim a major fraction of the income from mining/petro, import most of their consumption goods from abroad, and leave most citizens to make their own luck.

The "make their own luck" segment is the informal economy that most people in the third world depend on for their daily bread. Public services are slim to none, and what infrastructure there is oftentimes depends on the bribes/unofficial payments, since the state intents most formally budgeted public enterprises to be self-financing. Luanda, Angola and Kinshasa, Zaire are excellent living laboratories. But, we expect this in Africa, parts of the Mideast, and swaths of Asia. What the HBR study is really anticipating is the transition of the greater fraction of First World economies to this mode.

The idea that we can survive this transition via the sharing economy, the maker economy, the decentralized manufacturing economy is theoretically possible. But, exactly what level of "survival" are we talking? Given the current politics in the US, we are draining capital and resources from the bottom 99% faster than they (we) can reorganize to optimize an economic readjustment.

dgatwood's observations on US political tendencies starts off well, but I think goes off the rails at the bullet points.

Abstracted: “There’s not a dime’s difference between the Democrats and Republicans.” (coined by George Wallace; reused by Ralph Nader)

It's this sort of thinking that led a significant number of useful idiots to play at left-wing politics by voting Nader in 2000. I think the differences in outcomes between what we'd have likely seen from a Gore Administration and what we actually got from GWB are self-evident. It was certainly obvious to voters between '00 and '04, when Nader's national total dropped from 2.8 million to

Underestimating what brownish people are capable of, wasting hundreds of thousands of lives, pissing away trillions in treasure, and scamming via a mirror image of LBJ's guns and butter budget with a Republican guns and diamonds if that's a dime, my da kine is a redwood.

A few years back, Maui Electric upgraded their power distribution system by replacing wooden poles with steel towers. The claim was that the towers are much more typhoon-resistant, and I'm sure they are. However, given the aerodynamics of round cable, it's a given that the lines will still part in a gale. Why not bury the line? Because for most parts of the island, you hit blue rock (solid lava) within a few feet, and it's expensive to trench through. On the flip side, you only need to trench once, but Maui Electric decided to play the odds and go cheap.

According to the US constitution, arms is the correct approach to governmental oppression.

Ah, no, but thanks for playing. We are currently at a phase when civil participation in the political process is the correct approach. An armed approach is inefficient, and repeated resort to that approach leads to repeated resort to that approach. In addition, to burst a popular bubble, if you're imaging armed participation, it's very likely someone will pry it out of your cold, dead hands.

If you let a reasonably open and civil political system get to the point where an armed approach is the efficient solution, you've been sitting on the sidelines and/or remained clueless for too long. Just to be clear regarding our current situation, how you feel about cultural issues, "Obamacare", or abortion aren't relevant.... until someone comes along who really does care how you feel about it, and uses all that neat anti-terrorist infrastructure to show just how much.

I don't begrudge Lyft and Uber as an experiment in alternative transport. I think the growing sharing culture is a symptom of middle class economic stagnation, such that people are "driven" to monetize the spare capacity in their personal transport, their homes, etc.

What concerns me is that they are likely cherry picking transportation consumers. Those who can normally afford to spring for Lyft are then less likely to use public transport, and become alienated to its broader utility, much as those who live in gated communities aren't as concerned about addressing the crime rate in the surrounding community.